On January 12, 1684 William Musgrave in Oxford wrote with excitement to Francis Aston at the Royal Society of London that they had found a drawing of Cornelius Drebbel’s perpetual motion in the Bodleian Library, a copy of which exists in the letterbooks of the Society. In Musgrave's account, Drebbel and his clock were embraced as being of their scientific program. Such clock had been thought of as ancestral to Sir Christopher Wren’s design for a weather clock, and the weather clock that had just been realized by Robert Hook. Also in 1684, Dr. Martin Lister introduced the first meteorological graph to the same circle, plotting instrumental readings against time. The engine of Drebbel’s c. 1603 clock was, in fact, a form of Galileo’s weather-glass.

Since the very beginning of instrumental meteorology, the new philosophical instruments were seen in conjunction with the measure of time, just as time and weather happily coincided in the common almanac. This not only reflects the practicalities of early attempts at understanding changes in the weather, but also a deeper connection, where weather is, in essence, the way Western Europeans experienced time. This paper will trace this relationship through the course of the 17th century.